My hermit-like time is finishing

Alex is back tomorrow afternoon. All in all it hasn't been so bad and maybe it's even what I needed to get me over some of the horrors of last year. I've seen friends, enjoyed messing around with yarn (one jumper almost finished!) chatted to the rather bewildered cats and even gone shopping - not usually a favourite pass-time of mine but I did buy a great candle. It's reminded me how much I love seeing my one or two good female friends here. That's something I'm going to continue with. I've also been able to sit quietly and think about the programming of the new shop. All in all I realised that - even though a wonderful support person at Dreamhost saved my life by finally working out why I could not log in to our mailing list - some things at the server-end are beyond my capabilities. So I am seeing an experienced software engineer on Thursday in the hope that he will work a few days a month for us regularly. It would take a lot of the angsty stuff off me. I can do software, but when it gets to the edge of my knowledge it makes me very anxious, I'd much rather be working on the user-interface which is, after all, my real area of expertise (for anyone who hasn't gathered, I was a user-interface designer for years). The new shop software is genuinely well engineered - this much I DO have the experience to know. It's great, but means that there is a huge amount of back-end set up. For example, it can deal with separate shipping costs for every single country, so inputting and checking all the figures was in itself a day's work. It also has much better order tracking and more flexible capacity for rewards points and so on. It does brilliant meta-tagging, which ought to help people find the shop. Drawbacks? The look and feel is a touch hard to change, though as I quite like it that's not a huge issue. What else happened this ten days? Hmm, well I arranged finally to get Czech lessons - after all these years I now accept that no, I'm not going to pick it up my osmosis. I also at last began actively looking for a photographer to take professional shots for us. I'll probably say lots more about that as it's such an intense way of focusing on who we are, what we're doing and how to show it. So - after tomorrow I have the camera - and Alex - back. And hopefully three less neurotic cats. Or are the cats hoping that it's me who'll be less neurotic. Whatever, it'll be good to get back to normal, but all in all I'm not sorry this solitary ten days happened.